AuthorTopic: Cooley Rankings (Read 944 times)

Okay, so we all know the Cooley rankings are a joke, but I was wondering on how accurate their stats were on the searchable part. They seem to make a big deal about US News just getting numbers wrong, so are their number more accurate? It's kind of a nice tool to be able to search by a wide variety of factors, but are they accurate?

I would assume that they are. because if you look at very important factors like total job placement, even they place themselves in the bottom ten. I looked at percent passing the bar, and they are prety bad there as well.

Median LSAT score, employment after graduation, entering median GPA, expenditures, and acceptance rates are just a few of the highly manipulable stats in the ranking formula. As suspecting as it makes Cooley, their Brennan and Le Duc simply attempts to place equal weight on all the objective factors considered when "ranking" a school.

Median LSAT score, employment after graduation, entering median GPA, expenditures, and acceptance rates are just a few of the highly manipulable stats in the ranking formula. As suspecting as it makes Cooley, their Brennan and Le Duc simply attempts to place equal weight on all the objective factors considered when "ranking" a school.

Yeah, but these factors include rather trivial things like physical size of the school and number of enrollees.

The point of rankings is to quantify how strong a law school is. Both Leiter and USNWR use methods that state this as their attempt and the weight they put on each of these factors stems from their belief that they are coming up with a system that does this. Cooley just says they are giving 27 categories equal weight without taking into account what the rankings in each category actually mean. Instead of trying to bring up a very valid debate over whether rankings should be used at all Cooley instead makes a joke of itself by coming up with a system that ranks themselves above schools that are quite obviously better than them and passes it off as legit. That's why they're such a joke.

Median LSAT score, employment after graduation, entering median GPA, expenditures, and acceptance rates are just a few of the highly manipulable stats in the ranking formula. As suspecting as it makes Cooley, their Brennan and Le Duc simply attempts to place equal weight on all the objective factors considered when "ranking" a school.

Yeah, but these factors include rather trivial things like physical size of the school and number of enrollees.

The point of rankings is to quantify how strong a law school is. Both Leiter and USNWR use methods that state this as their attempt and the weight they put on each of these factors stems from their belief that they are coming up with a system that does this. Cooley just says they are giving 27 categories equal weight without taking into account what the rankings in each category actually mean. Instead of trying to bring up a very valid debate over whether rankings should be used at all Cooley instead makes a joke of itself by coming up with a system that ranks themselves above schools that are quite obviously better than them and passes it off as legit. That's why they're such a joke.

Well, it may not be trivial to some. But you are talking about only two variables out of 30+ variables measured..

Like I said, I agree that Cooley's ranking publication is not the best marketing tool. And it is a shame they continue to publish that book. But Cooley also states the intent or purpose for their ranking publication which is clearly different than the purpose of USNWR..

The point is, blasting a school simply because of a flawed marketing strategy isn't fair to those students who look at Cooley as a viable option. There are several good qualities to the law school. But those aren't interesting things to talk about. I think quite a few pre-law students take offense to Cooley's liberal admissions policy because it takes away the prestige and magnificence of acceptance to law school. So it's easier to just dismiss them as a joke.